UI Design
The design of what a user sees and operates — layout, type, colour, iconography and the visual states of every control.
Design DisciplinesUI design turns a defined structure into a usable surface: hierarchy that guides the eye to the primary action, spacing that groups related things, type that stays readable at real sizes, contrast that meets accessibility thresholds, and every state of every control specified. It is craft work with measurable constraints, not decoration.
It depends on UX design having answered what the screen is for. A beautifully executed interface for the wrong flow is still the wrong product, which is why the two are usually sequenced rather than merged — though on small teams the same designer does both, sometimes in the same afternoon.
In practice
A trading dashboard used the same weight and size for labels and values, so scanning a position took visible effort. Before: users reported the screen felt 'dense'. After dropping labels to a smaller, lighter treatment and raising numeric values, comprehension time in testing halved with no layout change. The catch — the flatter version had been chosen deliberately to look minimal.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between UI and UX design?
UX decides what the product should do and in what order; UI decides how that appears and behaves on screen. UX failures make a product useless, UI failures make it unpleasant or hard to read.
What accessibility basics should UI design cover?
Text contrast of at least 4.5:1 for body copy, visible focus states, touch targets around 44px, meaning never carried by colour alone, and text that survives being resized. These are baseline requirements, not enhancements.
Related terms
All terms- UX DesignThe design of how a product works from the user's point of view — what it does, in what order, and how it behaves when things go wrong.
- Visual DesignThe craft of composition, colour, typography and imagery — how an interface or asset looks, and what that appearance communicates.
- Interaction DesignThe design of how an interface behaves — what responds to what, in what order, with what feedback, and what happens when something goes wrong.
- Component LibraryA shared, versioned set of reusable interface components that designers and engineers build from instead of recreating elements per screen.
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Happy to look at what you're building and say where design would move the needle.
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